Is anybody ready to continue on in our 52 series, and we're going to start love and marriage.

Anybody excited for that? If you are married or have been married before in this room,

will you raise your hand? I just want to see who I'm talking about. Okay. If you are not married,

yet you hope to be married someday, you raise your hand if you're dating somebody

and one of you raised your hand and the other didn't you can walk out the back door here you can

go to henry's across the street and y'all can go talk that out it is for some of you for some of you hear a topic like love and

marriage and you get a little angsty you're like i've done the marriage thing and it was too

painful i don't want to talk about again or you're single and you don't want to be single and

you're like every time they talk about marriage i feel left out i'm not going to leave you out today

because what paul is doing in scripture where we're going today is he's painting a better picture than what your traditional view of marriage normally is. The age of our church is so much fun because people are getting married left and right. They're getting engaged left and right. They're having babies left and right. It's just a very, we've got a ton of empty nesters here and I love y'all. But there's so many young people that are thinking about getting married and I think at Sanford when you graduate you get a degree and a ring at the same time and you're just trying to figure all that out but one of the things Courtney and I've noticed with pre-marriage counseling we do a lot of it here because we've we just get invited to do a lot of weddings is there's so much we'll call it pressure on how do we make sure this wedding is awesome. Like that's just, there's a lot of that pressure. So when we usually meet with people four times and we sit down with them first and second time, and it's like they're like sweating pressure, you start asking me like, how are you doing? And they break out like a long list of things. They're like, I'm doing this.

I've got the invitations.

I've contact with this person. You know, they just started. There's so much anticipation and pressure. Even on the wedding day, when I'm there for the wedding, I'm just like the chillest guy in the world because I'm like watching the wedding planner and the moms do the whole battle of things. and I'm watching the bride, try not to sweat, and they keep dabbing her forehead to make sure she's not shiny in the pictures.

And I'm like, everybody try not to sweat and they keep dabbing

her forehead to make sure she's not shiny in the pictures and I'm like everybody's stressed because

there's so much pressure on the wedding because for somewhere in their mind the young people have this

idea that the marriage and the wedding is like the destination you get to they have this idea of like

if we can just get married and if things can just

go well, then we'll be ready to launch into our next season of life. But they don't understand that

you're like stepping into something way more holy than that. And then a million things can disrupt it.

One time I was doing a wedding with Jameson, who's on staff here, I was doing his wedding and we went

back to do communion. And their wedding was planned so well, and I turned, and the spiritual attack came immediately. Their back was to the audience, and I looked down, and the biggest red wasp in the entire world was on his wife's leg. And I'm like, oh my gosh, she's going to get stung during communion. We're about to have real blood right here. Like, it was a whole thing.

And I was like, looking at Jamison and I was like, this is your moment.

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